


Bring Your Daughter to Work Day

by Angeladarling (Orchidae)



Category: X-Men (Alternate Timeline Movies), X-Men (Movieverse), X-Men - All Media Types
Genre: Charles Being Concerned, Charles Xavier has a Ph.D in Adorable, Dysfunctional Family, Lorna is punk AF, M/M, Peter is Not Impressed, Protective Erik, Recreational Drug Use, Swearing, X-men meets Freaks and Geeks meets Scott Pilgrim, artistic liberties have been taken with everything, dadneto, discussion of the Holocaust and Nazi-hunting
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-11-03
Updated: 2016-11-03
Packaged: 2018-08-28 19:08:09
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,423
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8459533
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Orchidae/pseuds/Angeladarling
Summary: Fate and a horrible terrorist attack has reunited Erik with a daughter he never even knew he had. He tries to recruit her but things don't exactly go as planned. Also why is that Peter boy so upset?





	

**Author's Note:**

> This may have been done to death by now, I dunno it was just a silly idea I had where after the events of Apocalypse Erik ends up finding Lorna Dane and the two of forge a deep father/daughter bond while Peter just stands in the background crying.
> 
> I also had a story idea where Erik decides to form his own mutant school out of spite but attracts the wrong sort of people and it just ends up becoming a terrorist organisation. And the final battle with Xavier's school for gifted youngsters is a basketball game. And Hank wins the game like something out of the Teen Wolf movie and Erik just yells "He's not even a student, Charles!" I probably won't write that one, but I thought it was funny.

 

May 1983

 

“Honey, be careful with that thing. Electric ovens don’t come cheap.” Lorna’s mother warned as she watched her oatmeal spin and bubble through the glass window of the new microwave with the same look of concentration that tended to make household appliances break down. As a child she had distorted the colours on the TV when she got too close to the screen and wiped all her dad’s 8-tracks and even long after she had learned to control her abilities it had become a running joke that she did not mix well with technology.

“Do you think I could heat food if I tried?” Lorna asked.

“I don’t know, those things have a pretty high voltage,” said her father “and you’d probably need some sort of sealed heating chamber.”

“Oh.”

“But, if you managed to get up to a microwave frequency you could use it for other things. Radar for example, Navstar global positioning. Hey maybe we could get you at job at the airline, get you navigating for your old man.” Jed Dane was a commercial airline pilot, and his time spent at home was sporadic at best but when he was around the whole atmosphere of the house changed. He took an interest in her abilities, particularly now that she had started experimenting with electromagnetic radiation. Even her mother relaxed a little.

“As long as it’s not a flying bike.” Her mom said. Lorna sighed. You go on one airborne cycling spree after seeing E.T and suddenly you’re a vehicular menace for all eternity. Even now at almost eighteen with a perfectly valid driver’s licence getting permission to use the car was like getting blood from a stone. One day though, maybe after school ended, she would take a road trip out to some desert somewhere and just George Jetson that shit all over the place.

“That would be useful. But I’m not quite there yet. I did manage to pick up WLLZ last night.”

“Great, what have I told you about listening to music when you should have been doing your homework.”

“I’ll get round to it. And I wasn’t listening exactly, there’s no sound involved, I can’t really explain it.”

“Speaking of music,” Jed chuckled producing plastic carrier bag from HMV “I had a layover at Heathrow and I know you’re into all that British punk rock new wave whatever the hell it is music stuff so…consider this an early birthday present.”

“No way! Dad!” the bag contained some 7” singles and albums from bands she had never heard of. Bauhaus, Japan, Propaganda, Visage, the Smiths, all of them looked arty and exciting. She almost wished she had got up earlier then she would have had time to listen to a few of them. Almost. Lorna had a tendency to stay in bed until the last possible moment.

“I just asked the kid at the store to recommend some stuff. He seemed to know what I was talking about. He had a pierced eyebrow Sheila, can you imagine.”

“Oh my God, thank you.”

“Lorna, for Pete’s sake, there’s a naked man on the cover!” her mom sounded scandalised.

“Hey, dad bought it.” Lorna laughed. “I bet it’s full of homoerotic subtext.”

“Honestly, how do you even know about that stuff. I didn’t know what a homosexual was until I was thirty-five. And seriously, The Adicts? What does that say to young people?”

“Let’s all go to the Korova Milkbar for a bit of the old ultra-violence.” Lorna said doing a terrible Malcolm McDowell impression as she held the record sleeve up to her face.

“Oh, and don’t think I don’t know about what you do with those friends of yours.” Ah there it was. It was a regular point of contention, why a nice girl with Lorna’s potential would want to be friends with a gang of burnouts, freaks and, perhaps the real root of the problem, other mutants. Lorna always argued that freaks needed to stick together.

“I know you’re imagining orgies and heroin, mom, but it’s more like garage bands and pizza you know? I don’t think any of us really have the money or the sexual confidence for that kind of lifestyle.”

“You could at least try to fit in a little better at school.”

“Why? The year’s almost over, then I’ll never have to see any of them again.”

“I just don’t want you burning all your bridges. I know kids aren’t the most accepting group out there but you’re not exactly Miss Gregarious either, and if you just made a little effort, maybe did something nice with your hair…” Lorna had apparently been born with auburn hair but around the same time her powers manifested her hair had become the colour of copper carbonate. For as long as she could remember her mom had been dying it dark brown, the ammonia smell made her feel sick and when it was all finished she looked just like everyone else. A passing human.

‘ _Haven’t you already done enough to my hair’_ she thought, “I said I’d go to prom, I really don’t see what else I can do,” she said instead.

“You’re playing in a band at prom.”

“That means I’m technically going.”

“That means that you’ll show up, hide behind your guitar for a few hours and then you’ll go and smoke marijuana in the parking lot with those…boys.”

“Well we weren’t going to do it in the parking lot…”

“It’s not that I don’t want you to make friends with…other people like you, but the Smith boy? He literally makes things explode. Don’t you think that’s a little dangerous?” Randal ‘Redox’ Smith, was a mutant who could control chemical reactions which he mostly used to make his own pyrotechnics at gigs. What he lacked in singing technique he more than made up for with front man posturing. This had allowed their band, Something Something Explosion, to maintain a healthy amount of bookings.

She was about to argue when suddenly north wasn’t north anymore as she felt a brief shift in the earth’s magnetic field. Lorna always knew where north was, ever since she was a kid which meant she hardly ever got lost. The shift rattled her to her core, so much so that the oatmeal she had eaten very nearly made a reappearance.

“What the hell was that?” her mother screeched, she only ever cursed when she was scared and Lorna was glad she wasn’t the only one.

“I dunno, felt like an earth tremor or something.” “Wow, there hasn’t been an earthquake here in…well, I don’t even know how long.”

“Lorna? Sweetie? Are you ok?”

“Um…yeah, it’s probably nothing.” She said. “Listen, I need to get to school, I’ll see you later.”

“Okay, have a good day.” Her dad called after her, but she was already out the door Of course it wasn’t nothing, and by the end of the day hundreds of thousands of people across the world were dead. And suddenly it became a really bad time to be a mutant.

 

*

 

It had been a long time since she had felt anything like that. She had felt it before she had even seen it on the news. It was a long way away, and difficult to explain exactly, like a change in energy, a huge magnetic pulse. Later that day she watched in horror and fascination as a man dropped a stadium on the White House.

Later as she got a little older and mutants became known to the public she understood what had happened. The man, identified as Erik Lehnsherr, was now a fugitive. There had been a photo released to the public taken at a previous arrest. Lorna had carefully cut out each newspaper article about him and kept it in an elasticated folder. The information released by the press was frustratingly sparse. All she really knew what that Lehnsherr was in effect the first mutant she had ever seen aside from herself, and that the two of them shared an almost identical mutation which according to her research (she had searched through ten years’ worth of papers from the Journal of Genetics and Genomics) was incredibly rare.

 

*

 

No one really knew what had happened to her parents, only that the three of them had been in a plane crash and thanks to an early manifestation of her mutation Lorna had been the only survivor. After that, things had changed. She had been adopted by her aunt Sheila and uncle Jed up in Michigan, began to call them mom and dad as she eventually forgot all about her birth parents, but much to their consternation her powers didn’t show any signs of going away. She soon learned that she wasn’t moving the metal but the magnetic field around it. She didn’t really understand the science of it back then when she was a kid, and even through high-school she still didn’t get how the fuck magnets worked. But by the time she was six she could set the table without touching any of the stainless steel cutlery while her mother looked on worriedly. When she was eight she could mould iron like plasticine, and when she was fourteen she discovered that ferromagnetism was just the first stepping stone.

 “Just please, please try to blend in.” Sheila had asked her the day she had started high-school. “I know it isn’t fair, in a perfect world you wouldn’t need to hide like this, but they are literally beating mutants to death out there.”

“I won’t do anything. Don’t worry.”

Despite all her best efforts to blend in and spend her school days in relative anonymity, Lorna was still a freak. By sophomore year she gave up on being normal, clearly the other kids could smell the mutant on her or something, they might not have guessed what it was but they knew she was different. Lorna wasn’t exactly what people, particularly high-schoolers, would consider attractive. She was taller than average, thin and wiry and flat as a board, her smile was a little too sharp to be pretty.

Lorna Dane was the only girl in shop class. She somehow became adopted by the burnouts and the troubled boys who drove muscle cars and never went to their other classes. They spent their lunch breaks smoking out by the football field or cutting class and just driving around aimlessly.

She always worked with metal and even though the project had called for a wooden spice rack Mr Smith couldn’t bring himself to fail her when he saw her intricately scrolled wire creation.

 

*

 

After it was all over and the news had moved on to other stories while the world slowly rebuilt itself, Lorna looked through her old Magneto scrapbook, after no news of him had surfaced for at least eight years there had been a multitude of new material. Was he guilty? Did his role in stopping the incident merit a pardon for his previous crimes? All irrelevant since he had essentially disappeared again, and besides if he could start earthquakes then how exactly would they be able to make him stand trial? She flicked through the official photos, they were all largely the same only a little older, probably chosen to make him seem more intimidating to frighten the public. She scowled at the man in the photo, the man scowled back, she looked in the mirror and…well shit.

“Dad, is Erik Lehnsherr my father?” she asked out of the blue as he was reading the paper in the living room.

“What! Where would you get that idea? Honey, I know you have a very similar mutation, but that doesn’t mean anything. I’m sure there are a lot of mutants with… spines or something and not all of _them_ are related.” His voice tended to get higher when he was lying, and this was no exception.

“You’re being awfully defensive.”

“I know it’s worrying that he’s in the news again, and feeling him do those terrible things, well that must have been really upsetting but…” he sighed, when she had told him she had felt the earthquakes he had openly cried in a way she had never seen before, “Jesus Lorna how long have you been thinking about this?”

“About ten years. I was just scared of asking I guess.”

 “Well you might as well know. It’s not as though all this is going to die down any time soon.” He sighed. “You know your father was a CIC agent right?” She knew vaguely that her father had served in world war two and Korea, that he had been a special agent in the counter intelligence corps.

“Yeah?”

“Well after the war, well, it was chaos over there and a lot of the higher ups in the Nazi party managed to escape. Your dad volunteered to stay on and track them down, record evidence from the camps that sort of thing. Sometime around then he met Lehnsherr when he was collaborating with the Jewish Central Committee. They were… friends, of a sort. Or at least they had a close working relationship. After that the two of them regularly exchanged information that could lead to the capture of Nazi war criminals.”

“They were Nazi hunters?”

“Well, not officially, but he worked on some important cases. He passed intelligence to the German and Israeli taskforces that helped bring a lot of people to trial. Lehnsherr on the other hand, well he wasn’t exactly interested in obtaining legal justice, only in getting revenge. He killed a lot of people Lorna. Bad people, certainly, probably even justifiable to a lot of people, but killing is killing. And it robbed a lot of people of their chance to seek justice. I met him once, Arnold called in a favour and got me involved on one of their cases, we didn’t know what he could do at the time.”

“What was he like?”

“Angry mostly, didn’t talk much. He was clever though, had a sharp mind. I could understand why he and Arn were friends. I flew them to Paraguay to follow up a lead on one of the doctors at the camps. It was a dead end and by the time they came back their partnership had all but ended.”

“Why what happened?”

“It’s probably best if you don’t know. Anyway that’s where it would have ended except a few years later on, Lehnsherr just appeared out of nowhere on your parents’ doorstep, claiming he had become a wrongful suspect in the JFK assassination. They hid him, for a time and well I don’t know what happened after that exactly but your father turned him in. And then nine months later, you came along.”

“Oh…”

“I know you’re curious about why …you are the way you are. But you won’t like what you find when it comes to Lehnsherr. Just promise me you won’t go looking for him.” Dad always had a way of knowing what she was planning, which was why despite his jovial fun-loving appearance it was really hard to sneak out to parties when he was around. “I’m not saying you shouldn’t go and find yourself, I mean your mother might kill me for saying this, but college isn’t everything. I learned everything I know at the university of life and I’m doing okay. By all means you should look into it, find some other people with abilities. That special school for instance, they could help.”

“I don’t know. Isn’t the guy who runs that place some sort of telepath? He’d know who I was right away.”

“Just promise me you’ll stay away from Lehnsherr, that’s all I need to hear.”

“I promise. I know it doesn’t matter who my real father is, you’ll always be my dad, I just needed to know for sure.”

“Does it help?”

“No. Maybe. I don’t know. It’s been a weird week.”

 

*

 

It was some weeks later and graduation was looming, and Lorna still hadn’t made any real plans other than mess around all summer then find a job somewhere, maybe in auto repair. Mom was still strategically leaving brochures for colleges around the house, the ones with late application deadlines left open at the corresponding page.

“You’ll never guess where I got us a gig.” Redox said.  He was a year older than her and had gone to a different school but they had become friends two years ago when they had both rather foolishly volunteered for what passed as the town’s mutant community centre. Which was less of a centre and really more of a group that met every month at the church hall like some sort of cancer support group. Aside from the two of them it had included a woman who could photosynthesize through her green skin, a man with hypermobility who could twist his spine all the way around, and a guy with an upside down face. The project had lost its funding pretty quickly but Lorna and Redox had continued to hang out after school where they mostly played guitar (badly) listened to Rush and got high with his friend Josh Teitelbaum who was also the drummer in their group.

“Not another prom night. Please I beg you. I can’t play top 40 covers anymore it hurts my soul.” She hadn’t even wanted to go to her own prom and had somehow ended up getting roped into playing at three different schools and a rather disastrous wedding. These events usually limited them to party classics and pop chart hits. That being said, Redox’s rendition of Flashdance was a joy to behold.

“The Blue Lobster, dude!” he crowed happily as though it was supposed to mean something.

“The what? Is that like a Maine seafood restaurant or something?”

“It’s only the most popular mutant bar in Detroit.”

“Oh right because blue lobsters are a mutation, I get it,” Lorna said, “It’s a terrible name.”

“They also serve seafood. It’s part of this national mutant battle of the bands thing, all you need is at least one mutant in your group and you’re in the heats.”

“High standards.” Lorna chuckled,

“And get this, the finals are in New York. The winner gets a recording contract and a spot opening for Dazzler on her next tour.”

“Ok that is pretty awesome.” She loved Dazzler, even if her music was something of a guilty pleasure “Don’t you think it’s a little risky organising something like that? I mean it was bad enough before but with all the mutant hate crimes happening…”

“Lorna, I know your mom’s all jumpy about that kind of stuff, and I get it she wants to protect you, that’s better than most parents in her situation.”

“Your point?”

“My point is, hiding away won’t change anything. The more public we are the more normal we’ll become.”

“You sound like that Xavier guy,”

“Well what’s the alternative? The Mutant Brotherhood? The Mutant ‘we’re a legitimate social justice movement and definitely not a terrorist group anymore’ Brotherhood.”

“Ok, you have a point.” Since it had cleaned up its image since the whole Washington thing, The Brotherhood was, despite its recent popularity, very much the Sinn Féin of mutant rights groups. This was largely because Erik Lehnsherr had once been its leader and also because several members had links to a much more violent group in the 60s known as the Hellfire Club.

“So will you do it?”

“Fine.”

“Cool because I’ve been picking out some new names for us.”

“I like Something Something Explosion, it’s ironic.”

“Yeah but I’m the only one with a cool nickname. You need one too!”

“Lorna’s fine.”

“Yeah but, you can hear radio waves right? What about Radar?” she hadn’t been entirely truthful about the more metallokinetic side of her powers.

“You want to name me after that nerdy dude from M.A.S.H.”

“Come on! Redox and Radar! It’s genius.”

“Um it would be ‘Redox, Radar, and Teitelbaum’ which sounds like a law firm from the future.”

“Okay how about Radiohead?”

“That’s the dumbest name I’ve ever heard.”

“Longwave?”

“No.”

“Cool FM?”

“Please stop it.”

“Ah I’m so excited, we have to start rehearsing right now! I’ll call Josh, we need to rehearse, we need to decide on a setlist. Hey do you think we should wear costumes?” Lorna scowled “Okay, stupid question. But you have to admit, future lawyers could be an interesting look.” And just like that they had a goal for the summer.


End file.
